Interest in talent management (TM) continues to grow amongst practitioners, consultants and academics. Yet, conceptual development and empirical evidence remains limited and struggling to keep pace with the multitude of consultancy reports. This paper incorporates an exploratory case study in conjunction with large scale survey evidence from 260 multinational companies in Ireland to establish how TM is operationalised in practice. The survey results showed TM was far from being universally applied among all MNCs although significant numbers have systems in place. The case study, regarded as a best practice TM case in the consultancy literature, shows that talent pool segmentation according to the abilities and competencies of employees are utilised rather than firstly identifying pools of positions and then finding individuals. Additionally and consistent with over half of the MNEs surveyed, the case firm identify talented employees other than leadership or managerial talent but also their key technical, functional employees.